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Monday, 12 August 2013

A pall of smoke hung over Princes Street Gardens in the
Centre of Edinburgh.

‘That’ll be the smoke from the one o’clock cannon,’
explained a native Edinburgh chap to his companion. ‘It goes off every day at
one o’clock.’

‘It’s only ten to one’ , his friend pointed out.

So our native Edinburgher had to respond. What do most
people do when the information they are sure is accurate, is not? They feel
they have been caught out, the data is inaccurate and they clutch at pet phrases
or idioms. They bluster.

‘I’m entitled to my opinion’, he blustered on. Like the moon is made of green cheese or the
earth is flat. Does an ‘opinion’ really mean believing something to be true,
which verifiably is not?

In London, at the opposite end of the importance of data
scale, I encountered one of these life
changing ‘Aha!’ moments. The chap, peering at a complex data set, pushed his
glasses up on to his forehead and said ‘Aha, this is not AF. It’s a history of
episodes of SVT.’

This is the world of identifying heart problems and their
treatment.

Our chap read a set of data produced by a machine which
recorded heart beats and was saying ‘this is not a pattern of irregular and
very fast heart beats, merely a pattern of very fast heart beats.’

Important – Oh yes! and directly contradicting the ‘opinion’
of a previous expert.

Another case of ‘everyone’s entitled to their opinion?’

Oh no! – this is a failure by one professional to read a set
of data properly, the consequence being a wrong diagnosis and a wrong treatment
plan.

Nothing wrong with the data collection, nothing wrong with
data presentation – a lot wrong with data interpretation. There are
professionals and then there are specialists – often a specialist makes the
genuine difference.

Are either of these case studies transferable to your
company or organisation?